by John Boorman
“Will he be punished for that?”
“Of course,” said Friend knowingly, smiling with memories.
They moved through wooded lanes away from the main buildings, and down toward the lake where Zed had first encountered May.
“But you have no police, no Exterminators.”
Friend laughed. “Oh, we discuss it endlessly. Every little sin and misdemeanor. Raked over and over—”
“Then what happens to him?”
“He’ll get six months for that at least.”
“Prison?”
Friend laughed. “No. Aging.”
Aging, what could he mean by it?
“I’m getting old myself,” Friend said languidly from his comfortable seat on the cart. “Six months here. A year there. These sentences add up. They age you, but they don’t let you die.”
“Why not kill yourself?” Zed ventured.
“I do now and again, but the Eternal Tabernacle simply rebuilds me.” Another sardonic thought struck Mm, twisting a smile onto his lips.
“Do you want to see immortality at work?” said Friend to the panting Zed, and so saying gave him a jog down a new road and up a hill. A curious building came in sight. Letters spiked above a low one-story building: STARLIGHT HOTEL. The words had outgrown what they described, a flower dwarfing its roots, belying them. The bizarre decoration promised a much grander platform than the one from which they came.
Friend chuckled at Zed’s confusion. “This is where they live – the Renegades. They are condemned to an eternity of senility. We provide them with food, but they are shunned. They are malicious and vicious, so in and out fast. I, myself, feel quite at home in there.”
They rattled toward a huge glass doorway that stood open. Some thirty old people reached out to meet them. They were ancients. The room was decayed and frightful. Tatters of decorations hung down like creepers from the ceiling. A three-piece band tootled from a tiny stand at one end of the hall. The ancients wore evening dress, yellowed, patched, frayed, and torn. Around the floor in what had been dining booths, others, too old to move, lay in cribs.
Zed sped in to the dance floor, drawing the cart fast, then skidded in a turn to take them straight out again as Friend hurled out the loaves. The ancients were galvanized and ran shrieking to the food. They fought and clawed for the bread, reducing it to scraps and crumbs as the cart burst into the sunshine once again, and off down the path back into the woods. The cackles of the Renegades followed them down the gentle hill.
They clattered into a new place. High gates were open. Another courtyard was before them, formed of bleak cottages. As they rolled by Friend threw loaves of bread into doorways. No faces appeared, it was a dead place.
He steered the cart into a barn that opened from the yard, then jumped down. Zed, relieved of the burden, stepped from the shafts, lowering the cart.
Winded, Zed stepped back – onto something.
The room was filled with people. They had the mien of the transported ones, except they weren’t contained in cloth cocoons. They had the familiar look of Friend’s statues. They were certainly alive, but what kind of life was it?
Friend smiled at Zed’s bewilderment. He pointed to a dead-faced girl. “I loved this girl once, Monster,” then, to the crowded room, “You idle Apathetics are a melancholy sight.”
The soft gong sound came from his ring, interrupting him.
“You are asked to vote at the termination of the trial of George Saden. Final statement from the accused begins.”
George Saden was projected onto Friend’s face through the ring. The inhabitants turned their heads slowly to look at him.
Saden began to speak, and as he did so, the others gathered in frightful slow motion around them, forming a fence of deathly people.
“I confess to the charges. I try to suppress these thoughts, but they leak out in second level through the head wound of my third death. I was imperfectly repaired.” His face changed, becoming defiant. “No – it is not true! I think what I think!”
Friend smiled down at him. “That’s more like it! I’m with you, George.”
It was as if George heard him.
“I hate you all, I hate you all, I hate you all – especially me.”
The image faded.
“Vote please. Vote please.”
The people around them seemed aware but powerless to act. Either from atrophy or months of idle sub-emotions, their bodies stood—on the edge of life and reason.
Friend talked into the ring.
“I’m voting for the poor sod. It won’t do any good, nothing does… Absolute acquittal.”
Zed walked up to one exquisitely beautiful girl who seemed to be looking at him. He grasped a breast, then squeezed it. No response. She was still slowly focusing back from where he had been to where he was now, her nervous system, minutes behind his, dulled and defeated.
Friend smirked. “Go on—help yourself!”
Zed caressed the girl, gently, then fiercely. She submitted blindly with no response to him—for or against. Friend walked among the others and placed their arms in weird positions. There they stayed, then slowly sank back to their original positions, through the liquid air.
“Didn’t Zardoz tell you about the Apathetics? No? It’s a disease and it’s slowly creeping all through the Vortexes. That’s why Zardoz made you grow crops—to feed these people. We can’t support them anymore. Apathetic or Renegade—take your choice.”
Zed gulped at the information and it stuck inside him. His God was a grain-ship to feed these infirm people. Emotional mutes, sad statues that were once Eternals. Zed saw them clearly, he saw inside them,, and there lay a voice. This could consume him. He felt the pull of their great sad emptiness and was afraid. No enemy had been so passive yet so strong. Their very weakness was their strength. He felt them pulling him like the spirits of the dead into a grave that had no end. These Apathetics drew him to an endless night, where he could see and feel but not move. To be paralyzed by some great insect demon, like a helpless grub, and then to live on while the canker of another vulture ate into his live but mordant flesh. They, had ceased to live and yet they could never die. He felt the process starting, his limbs were leaden. He could not move. The soft assurance of the living dead enfolded him. He felt an awful sleep come upon his face and neck, his eyes dropped and glazed. He could not scream, he was buried alive in the thin crisp air.
His heart still fluttered at its steady speed but slowed a trifle, sinking him to their torpor. His blood was cooling down to their icy level. Then his heart stirred and pumped faster. He would not be drawn into their web. His blood pulsed quicker and his brain began to fight the numbness of their gaze. He would survive and win. He would endure. He would surmount them all. His body sang, his limbs, flexed, he was alive, he sprang.
Zed picked up the girl and threw her into a pile of straw, where she lay like a monstrous doll.
Zed smashed a barrel into the wall. He overturned a cart and roared out his life’s energy in a cry. Some of the Apathetics stirred, some rose to their feet. The girl’s eyes flickered from the straw, perhaps with fear. Zed stopped, spent. Friend clapped ironically.
“Good—now you’re beginning to show yourself.” Zed felt the clammy hand of despair touch him for the first time. The nameless, faceless foe that confronted him seemed overwhelming.
The gong rang again. The Apathetics settled once more into their sea-bed trances.
“Final votes: For: nine Against: five hundred and eighty-six; undecided: eighty-six. George Saden will be aged five years.”
Friend scowled, then his face cleared, and he turned to Zed.
“Welcome to Paradise!”
The commune was assembled. Once again Zed was on show in the large orange room.
As they examined him, so he looked back at them.
There were not more than thirty active members at any time. The building and the grounds could accommodate a great many more. Where were they now? Either Apath
etic or Renegade.
Time was wasting, drawing him to his execution date. How would they kill him? He knew death, but the Eternals' stoical mixture of superior knowledge, emotional indifference, and perpetual childhood chilled him. They were like the wicked, spoiled children of some giant father who had abandoned them in this luxurious nursery. Perhaps they gradually grew to adulthood over hundreds of years. Had they dispatched their elders? Was he at the mercy of genius infants who had the intellect of gods but were swept by more sinister feelings than he could comprehend?
He calmed as he saw what, was happening to his thoughts. It was true that his thinking was beginning to slide toward panic. What did he know?
The ring: Each member of the commune wore one. With it they could speak to each other and to a central being who could assemble, organize, and relay this and other information back to them. A central being presided over all the Tabernacle. The pyramid: An underground fortress. It might have been built as a shelter against an enemy and a force of which Zed could not conceive. Certainly it was impregnable and contained the core of the community. They called it the Tabernacle room. To him it was a place of interrogation and horror.
Here it was they were remade, if they were damaged or killed. Which led him to the last fact—they were Eternal. His hosts would never die. Even if he eliminated them all they would start to regrow deep underground and reappear miraculously like the spring corn from the ground, the exact match of the last crop. He knew that the womblike machinery worked faster than its human counterpart. Frayn, the man he had shot, the man who had seemed so certain about Zed, would return in a few days, fully formed, with all his faculties and memories intact, to confront him.
So the central mind was hidden, protected by thin air; the only entry to it was through the crystal on the ring. The Tabernacle was impregnable.
The Eternals could never be destroyed.
He was their prisoner, temporarily, until death or escape stepped in. All these facts were real.
And yet there were other meanings, other signs around him that imported other stories with hope for him. The leaders were May and Consuella, once united by ; more than common interest; by love. This powerful union : had long ended. He could feel old hungers stirring in , them. Were they for him and for his lust, or was it for revenge on his tough male reality? May seemed the weaker of the two at present, but she had a large group of followers, silent, discreet, all female, all devoted to her. Consuella, though the stronger, was alone. He felt her deadly presence. She could not be bought or flanked. She would be victorious or vanquished.
There was dissension at the center of the group; he could help to take it further.
Friend could be an ally, but was he too remote and weak like all the men here? He lived on the edge of the tribe, and might soon be cast into exile. Dare Zed follow him as a comrade, or would such effort be misspent? Apathy might soon be fate. At least the existence of those half-dead Apathetics showed the Vortex to be failing. It showed the central plan to be at fault. If it had failed here, Zed could make it fail elsewhere.
Yet all the inmates here were gifted and special. Each had his own sphere of knowledge, but each had to work as a menial every day. Apparently they needed to keep in touch with earth and air, for they were almost nothing more than spirits. Zed was live and strong, his soul was one with his body; these people were near-wraiths compared to him. They were always being interrupted to be one with the governing process, while in Zed’s tribe all was happily talk or action. Here wrangling and petty conflicts neutered change.
He must keep them guessing; the longer he intrigued them, the longer he would live.
He must continue to divide them, amaze them, the while striving to gain entry to the secret center. His life was slipping by, they would soon kill him. They were without heart as he was, and yet they lacked an inner fire.
They were safe, secure, and wise. He had not seen one predator or giant cat since his arrival. No raiders swooped and killed. No person went armed or had need to, so why their agitation over him? He must soon find where May had put his gun, for armed he could match them all; but unarmed he might be quickly dispatched. They were protected by some agency around their land that never slept and always stood on watch. Even so, Zed had come through this magic screen. If he had done this, what could now stand in his way that he could not defeat?
These pretty, peerless enemies of his had youth, strength, and intellect forever. They had been matched and chosen as had he, they were like gods to him, but he could see their empty centers. He could see them as they really were, hideous, depraved, and wanton; superficial parasites upon a blighted land.
This tribe was long gone into a fall, but it did not show—yet. It was still awesome in its power but so much less than it had been. He would prise open the cracks that run through it, then wedge them farther, till he split the whole apart. If he had time. Time…time was running by his side against him in a race for his own life or all their deaths.
This recollection and review whirled through his mind as he stood gazing at the group. Outnumbered he was, but he was a warrior, used to battle and fierce conflict. He loved a contest to the death. All the protagonists here assembled, even the magic ring creature, were not fighters; they had not the ways of killing. Even if they had the knowledge in their heads, it was not felt, it was against their mode, their principle of passive, slow, safe living. Why learn to fight when you cannot die? But Zed knew all the ways of war.
Consuella was conducting this investigation. He must be careful as she would use this chance to speed him forward to the lip of death. It was an unhappy fact that she was enemy. She was fine, strong, and determined—a worthy mate for a chieftain like himself.
Everything here must be turned to his advantage.
Every foe could become his friend.
Consuella was his deadliest enemy, yet she could be subverted.
Where Zed had stood before to entertain the commune with his life-memory, now he stood again.
Friend was in the forefront of the audience and May was in attendance as Consuella began her lecture.
“Penic erection was one of the many unsolved evolutionary mysteries surrounding sexuality. Every society had an elaborate subculture devoted to erotic stimulation.”
The audience was bored but looked sleepily at their new toy, Zed, with mild interest.
Onto the giant screen flashed a succession of bizarre sexual pictures. The couplings of ages, funny, sad, extraordinary, all heaving in various degrees of beauty depending on the time and culture from which they came. The watchers gave no sign of arousal; it was as if they had been formed sexless and inanimate long years ago.
“…But nobody could discover how this—became this.”
Consuella poked her long pointer at the screen as a flaccid penis appeared there. She rapped it and it rose to full erection. Someone yawned, another scratched his nose and looked into the garden beyond the room. Only Friend was intent upon the experiment Consuella was oblivious to them, as she warmed to her project.
“Of course we know the physical processes involved, but not the link between stimulus and response. There seems to be a correlation with violence—with fear. Many hanged men died with an erection. You are all more or less aware of our intensive researches into this subject.”
One or two shifted uneasily under her gaze as if in memory of some past public humiliation.
“Sexuality probably declined because we no longer needed to procreate. Eternals soon discovered that erection was impossible to achieve and we are no longer victims of this convulsive, violent act which so debased women—and betrayed men.”
Could this be true? thought Zed. Were they all so far removed from their true selves as to be just empty containers for their intellect? Had their skins’ surface atrophied into a numbness? Could they not feel the inner quickenings of pleasure, loss, union?
“This Brutal—like other primates leading unselfconscious lives—is capable of spontaneous and refl
exive erections. As part of May’s studies of this creature we are trying once again to find the link between erotic stimulation and erection. This experiment will test autoerotic stimulation of the cortex leading to erection.”
May flashed a glance at the crowd in response to Consuella’s words. A few stirred in anticipation; perhaps they recalled Zed’s life-projection and hoped for something as exciting now.
Consuella passed the communicator ring over Zed’s head and body and a line appeared on the screen, slightly oscillating, a visible reflection of Zed’s sexual pulse. The watchers’ feet shuffled as they leaned forward, the better to see the screen.
He was turned to face the screen.
Images began to appear there.
Images which began to drive him.
Every imaginable aspect of sexual woman appeared before his eyes, and some aspects that he could not have imagined. Incessantly, in sequences and cadences, they flashed before him.
Remembering his reasoning before the lecture started, he realized that he must not act as predicted—the longer he could confuse them, the longer he would live.
May came over to him, and she began to massage his body.
The imagery grew in intensity, but he perceived a mechanical background to all the picture sequences. There was an organization in them, they were clever repeats. He watched the line of his own response moving across the pictures like a ripple on a pool, steady and calming. He focused on the line—its evenness, its orderliness.
It was a projection of himself. In contemplating its quietude, he was feeding back still more calmness. The women behind the line grew in sensual ardor and convolutions. He held steady on the white, line in front of the heated writhings.
May grew more attentive. He forced himself to breathe more evenly. He could recall some of the visuals. They were rerunning the program, a reedition, but a rerun. He was steady. His body was stabilized from within. He was holding the Tabernacle back, contesting its power.
May signaled to Consuella. She walked between Zed and the screen. He looked back at her, unafraid. She would not dare to strike him in public, during an experiment, and so lose face.